About Our Acts

Climate Guardians demand a #JustTransition for the Latrobe Valley community

ClimActs is a politically strategic, voluntary run Australian performance collective using striking visual spectacle and satire to communicate the urgent need for the world to respond to grave threats from climate change. Each act has been carefully created to address an aspect of the climate debate.

This image was accompanied by a feature article in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, by Larissa Dubecki

ClimActs‘ satirical acts include the Coal Diggers, and their cyber-psycho-analysing Hackers Guild which epitomise the recklessness and insatiable greed of the fossil fuel industry and their political and financial backers. The Medieval Astronomers from the Flat Earth Institute of the Universitarse of Climatastropharse (est 1033AD) are wilfully, blindly ignorant serial deniers, and the players from the substrata-obsessed Frackers Guild are as ridiculously desperate and shortsighted as they are subhuman.

Coal Diggers stealing the red carpet at the world premiere of the fossil fuel glorifying, global warming denying ‘Climate Hustle’

Regardless of the guises in which ClimActs appears, they play a role of peaceful social disruption; manifesting at major rallies, backdropping or intercepting political events, and bringing a theatrical and uplifting presence to public demonstrations, non-violent blockades and occupations against major polluters and their political and financial backers. All of our work demands climate justice, as outlined in our Safe Climate Demands.

Flat Earthers with their mentor Lord Monckton

ClimActs has also performed as guest artists at Australian and international festivals including staging the opening performance art piece for the Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2014, two performances for the City of Ballarat’s Interventions (2014), four performances for the City of Ballarat’s Winter Laneway Festival (2015), at ArtCOP21 (Paris, 2015), at the Sydney Lord Mayor’s special Preview Opening of Janet Laurence’s H2O Water Bar (Paddington Reservoir, Sydney, 2016), the Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (UK, 2016), the Australian Performing Arts Centres Associations (APACA) Conference/PAX (2016), the Biennale of Australian Art (BOAA) in Ballarat (2018), and at the launch of Janet Laurence: After Nature at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2019).

For helping inspire ClimActs’ creative modus operandi, we gratefully acknowledge the brilliant work of the John Howard Ladies Auxiliary Fan Club (aka The JoHos, co-created by Liz Conor and Zelda Grimshaw), The Yes Men, and the founders of Victoria’s Quit Coal Collective.